Twelve years ago, we were laying together in my bed, your head on my chest, not asleep so much as suspended, paused, an inhalation of time

held

and held

and held

until you father said something or the other, what it was doesn't matter at all, and you turned your head all the way around until you faced him. Your bright blue eyes flickered open, reseting the clock on ours lives, and you didn't say a word, or even make a sound, you just looked at his voice.

You were four minutes old.

Babies aren't supposed to do that, you know.

I knew you the second I met you in that hospital bed in that birthing suite in that city at 5,280 feet up into the sky. I didn't just know you like, "Oh, he looks enough like his father that I don't think we'll have to eat this one" know you, I knew you like I wasn't at all surprised today when you came home from birthday shopping with a cross-stitching kit instead of Legos. I knew you like I know when you're in your room crying at night. I knew you like I do every single second of the day that I cannot ever unhear the pounding of your tiny, precious little heartbeat.

You were the first person I'd ever met in my life that I felt that familiarity with, and it was the most comforting feeling I've ever know, knowing without any doubt that I was meant for this person, and he for me, in some unseeable, indefinable way. If you decide to believe in magic, it's because we are both Pisces, and so we've done this a few times already, and if you decide to believe in science, it's just that you got a little more of my electro-genetic batter in the bowl, and if you end up believing in a God, it's because He was looking out for us and made sure that we had each other.

I am never going to be able to answer the how, and I probably will never answer the why, but you - simply by existing - have undone more damage than you will ever fathom could be done to another person. You sitting across a table from me, flaring your Angry Nostrils just to make me laugh, has covered multitudes and multitudes of other people's sins. The hardest thing I ever had to let go of was my faith, and your being gave it back to me thousand-fold.

You made me believe in something well beyond myself, or this world, or any other thing made of man.